Sabayon Linux Overview

Real World Equivalent

"Sabayon is an Italian dessert made with egg yolks, sugar, a sweet liquor (usually Marsala wine), and sometimes cream or whole eggs. It is a very light custard, which has been whipped to incorporate a large amount of air."

Real theory

Sabayon Linux is an operating system powered by the Linux kernel and GNU. There are many Linux flavors, but most geeks just call them distributions. We are a Linux distribution, though, and try to provide our users the best and most complete computing experience.

Our philosophy follows two simple statements:

A)OOTB (out of the box) Functionalities: There should be no problems and everything should "just work."

B)KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid!

Moreover, to achieve this, Sabayon Linux uses Gentoo's testing branch as its base. It is (and always will be) 100% compatible with it. We are one of the most scalable distributions and are happy to support everyone from the most creative kernel hacker to the newbie. How? Because of point A above, and because Gentoo Linux is THE most extensible Linux distribution, no one can say anything to the contrary. In particular, Sabayon is based on Gentoo's testing branch. Gentoo's testing branch is about on par with Debian's Sid (unstable branch) releases. Though based on the bleeding edge, you will find Sabayon is quite stable and perhaps more cutting edge. Both Sabayon and Gentoo are on rolling release cycle, but Sabayon will have release snapshots.

What Sabayon Linux is NOT

It is NOT a binary-only distribution. Yes, you can install Sabayon Linux in half an hour and have a powerful desktop under your hands. But, our current policy does not support the idea to fork Gentoo Linux package management because users don't like to waste time compiling. We have a clear idea; if you don't want to compile a lot of packages just wait for the next release, because you will always be able to:

Update your current installation to the latest Sabayon Linux by running the Sabayon Linux installer and choosing the Upgrade option

Keep up to date, Sabayon Linux release cycles are very, very short. If you just want to keep your PC secure, just use the glsa-check utility.

It is NOT developed with politics in mind. This means that if we like an application over another, it's just because it could work better and be closer to our OOTB philosophy described above.

It is NOT company-driven. We have always been users, and then developers. That's our power and our view. We only want something that works without Microsoft and their superficial operating system implementation!

It is NOT Ubuntu! We don't try to mimic any other distribution, we just take the best from each one.

How is Sabayon Linux different from other distributions?

Sabayon is a rolling release. If installed once and updated regularly, you shouldn't need to reinstall new versions. Simply use the GUI package manager or command line if you choose, to keep up to date.

Unlike most other distributions, it's completely independent from commercial interests. No big firm stands behind Sabayon Linux and dictates what it should do. The developers of Sabayon Linux are all users from other Distributions, so they started to make a distribution "from users for users".

Screenshots

You can see a large number of screenshots of several versions of Sabayon Linux, including screenshots of the screens displayed during installation to hard disk, on the following page:

gentoo=nohdparm nohdparm ide=nodma: If the system hangs on hdparm service startup or your system does not have DMA Hard drives, try this.

acpi=off: disable ACPI completely.

pci=noacpi: disable ACPI for PCI maps (HP servers and VIA chipsets).

pci=nomsi: disable MSI (Message Signalled Interrupts). Some chipsets do not handle MSI well, leading to difficulties in identifying Hard Drives and other devices.

floppy.floppy=thinkpad: useful for some ThinkPad notebooks.

all-generic-ide: useful when your IDE CD/DVD Reader is not detected at boot

vga=771: useful on some wide-screen laptops. It forces a healthy framebuffer resolution.

maxcpus=1: set the max of CPU's to be used by the kernel. Usefull for macbooks.

doslowusb: If you run grub(2) from an external HD this is what you want to add.

scandelay=10: If you run grub(2) from an external HD this is what you want to add.

NOTE:Feel free to add extra cheat codes.

KMS (Kernel Mode Setting)

Since the linux-sabayon 2.6.33 kernel version KMS got gently introduced.
If you enable KMS you let the Kernel set the screen resolution instead of Xorg.
For Intel based video this has become mandatory since xorg-server 1.7 and it is enabled by default for that.

To use KMS with the Opensource ati driver:

radeon.modeset=1

To completely disable KMS:

nomodeset

Special features

Sabayon Linux supports some enhanced features, like the ability to surf anonymously, Internet Kiosk framework and persistent home directory.

What is Tor/Privoxy

Just start with the boot option:

tor: enable the system to use Tor/Privoxy system to surf the web anonymously.

is a free software implementation of second-generation onion routing — a system enabling its users to communicate anonymously on the Internet. Originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory, Tor became an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) project in late 2004. The EFF supported Tor financially until November 2005 [1], and continues to provide web hosting for the project.

Like all current low-latency anonymity networks, Tor is vulnerable to correlation attacks from attackers who can watch both ends of a user's connection. In a number of countries, including the US, various government agencies have access to connection data of a large number of internet service providers. Because of this, Tor is not suitable for protection against big-brother-like observation by those government agencies.

What is Internet Kiosk

Again, just start with the boot option:

internetkiosk: enable Internet Kiosk mode (do not use this - use the command outside).

nxclient: used along with "internetkiosk" parameter, autostarts NX Client.

Internet Kiosk is an automated Internet navigation system based on Sabayon Linux, KDE and NoMachine NX Server/Client. You can not only surf the internet, you can listen to music across the NX network, burn CD/DVD from your terminal, print your photo, play 2D games, use your Flash Pen, write and read Office documents (OpenDocument and MSOffice ones).

How it works:

Internet Kiosk System starts if you meet these requirements:

A NoMachine NX Server available (that will be the real locked-in user desktop)

A Thin Client with NX Client or an OLD Computer with at least 192MB of RAM, a DVD Reader and 2MB of non-volatile memory like USB flash memory or IDE HD.

There are two Operational modes:

Internet Kiosk NX: A memory device /dev/sda1 or /dev/hda1 must be available. This can be formatted in ext3, reiserfs, xfs, reiser4, ext2 or FAT32 (very important because most of USB keys are pre-formatted with this filesystem). If you don't have this partition, you can boot SabayonLinux LiveDVD normally and then use Partition Editor on the desktop (aka GParted) to create it. Priority is given to /dev/sda1. So, if you have /dev/sda1 and /dev/hda1, /dev/sda1 will be used. At boot time, init scripts change Default Desktop Environment to Fluxbox, stop some services, like SSH, Syslog, Clamav, FreeNX Server, and autostart NX Client with the configuration files created/stored (automagically by SabayonLinux) on our non-volatile memory. In addition, a script "startinternetkiosk.sh" can be placed on it and will be called in the boot runlevel. From 2.60.2, another script "startinternetkiosk_endboot.sh", can be called before X load and must be placed in the same directory of startinternetkiosk.sh.

Internet Kiosk: The difference is that it will only call "startinternetkiosk.sh" (boot runlevel) and "startinternetkiosk_endboot.sh" (before X start) from your non-volatile memory and no other changes are made.

What is XsistenCe

One Removable Device (USB storage) + Sabayon Linux = your data everywhere. In other words, you can use your Home directory in read/write mode and your data will be stored on your external non-volatile removable device.

Just have a previously formatted USB external disk (like a flash pen).

A blank file called "xsistence-mode" on the root of the USB storage above.

Some free space on it, at least 15 MB.

Add "xsistence" boot option to enable it.

If the System detects a previously created image file, it will use that.

If the System does not detect an XsistenCe image, it will be created.

You can specify the size (MB) of it, by adding: "xsistence_mb=xxx"

boot example:

sabayon xsistence xsistence_mb=100

Gaming and multimedia capabilities

Sabayon Linux is the most advanced and complete Linux distribution when it comes to multimedia completeness and capabilities. Use the parameters below only in ISOLINUX command line mode (no need to write those in Sabayon Linux 3.2).

OpenGL and Accelerated Desktop

If you want to try to get your OpenGL Acceleration or your Accelerated Desktop to work in cases that it doesn't, just poke with the commands below. You only need to add those parameters to the boot commandline.

opengl

Force the System to use a specific OpenGL subsystem, when autodetection fails.